The Art Tutorials Wiki is now open! See it and contribute!

Some background for this project: Last year, I started with drawing after a break of more than 10 years after I purchased a graphics tablet. Back then, my drawings were crude and primitive (I'm slowly getting better, but I not really "good", either).

So naturally, I sought out online tutorials helping me with digital art. And I found lots. But it was quite difficult to find the exact one I wanted. And naturally, there were lots of cool tutorials that I didn't even knew I wanted until I found them.

So I put them all into a large link list. Which got large. Really large. Eventually, there were so many that organizing them into a wiki seemed like the logical conclusion.

But then I thought that maybe a wiki collecting them could be more than that. After all, it could as well serve as a repository for new tutorials - creating them becomes easy within the framework of a wiki.

Now I've set this wiki in motion. Eventually, I hope that it will become the first stop for anyone anywhere seeking any kinds of tips on any kind of artistic endeavor.

But of course, I can't do that alone. I've started several wiki projects over the years, and while some of them floundered, the success of one one them has by far exceeded my expectations, with multiple daily updates continuing to this day even without my direct participation. So what can you do to help?

First of all, go take a look at it. The tutorial links section is already quite extensive, and anyone who does digital art in any way will likely find something of interest. Bookmark the site. Tell your friends who also might be interested in it. Perhaps you can also put a link to it into your signature. By merely making the wiki better known, you can contribute significantly to its success.

Furthermore, you can add additional links to it. While the link lists are extensive, they are far from complete - and they have a bias towards digital art as well (because that's what I am primarily interested in). Add your own links, creating new categories as needed.

Finally, if you are up to it, you can add new tutorials of your own (naturally, these should be your own creation instead of the work of someone else!). So far, there's only one example of such tutorials - the beginnings of a Cartography tutorial I wrote elsewhere (I plan to add the rest of the tutorial over the course of the weekend). But it should be enough to get you started. You can also add all sorts of essays and texts for the tools you are using - anything which might help an artist.

Devious Comments

I just noticed that the wiki recently had its one-year anniversary. All in all, I am fairly satisfied with what I have achieved - a large repository of art-related links and information. And though I wish more would work on it, there have been a few people who have added original tutorials to it...

I've added a new Improvement Guide to the wiki, which seems to be helping - a few more people have started to make edits and new additions.

For anyone willing to help out, this sub-forum lists websites with a large number of tutorials which I'd like to link to from the wiki but haven't found the time for yet - and that might not happen for a long time, since I am rather busy with simply adding the newest tutorials here on DeviantArt.

I'm not sure if you have checked this out, but there are a plethora of tutorials here. Everything from digital to traditional, to anime to realism, to anatomy and coloring. Perhaps these could make a nice addition to the website.

Wow, those are a lot of links. Now if only somebody would help me add them to the wiki...

(Hint, hint. )

As for the bakaneko links, it's possible that some of the links are no longer up to date - I gathered most of them last summer. I'll have to check them again at some point in the future and if necessary alter or prune them.

Close to the bottom of each wiki page are a number of commands in gray. One of these is called "edit". Click on it, and you will see the current page in wiki code. Do your changes, and then save it again.

Internal links - links to other pages in the wiki - have to be entered in triple square brackets. For example, a link to a "Photomanipulation" page would look like this:

[[[Photomanipulation]]]

You can create such links even if no such page exists yet - in that case, the link will be displayed in gray instead of blue. When you click on such a link, you will automatically be taken to the "edit" function of the new page, and you can thus create this page.

External links have to be put into single square bracket, followed by the description of the page you are linking to. For example, if you want to create a link to a page with the URL: